I have Marc's numbers, and will make them available. I like them sometimes, but for sharp margins, sometimes I prefer others
On a related note, do you remember when Dave Porter was doing his focus alignment piece, he mentioned to do an Edit->Auto-Align Layers. In that tool there are 4 options: Auto, Perspective, Cylindrical, and Reposition Only. I think he chose Auto, but I could be wrong.
Nik, do you remember? And yes I know CS4 has a tool built in for focus blending
"Don't ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to. Oh well."
-Fleetwood Mac
On a related note, do you remember when Dave Porter was doing his focus alignment piece, he mentioned to do an Edit->Auto-Align Layers. In that tool there are 4 options: Auto, Perspective, Cylindrical, and Reposition Only. I think he chose Auto, but I could be wrong.
Nik, do you remember? And yes I know CS4 has a tool built in for focus blending
David, he was using Auto.
And don't forget, in CS4 you have Focus Stacking auto-blend mode:-)
Jason, blending two images - one lights and one darks ( they can be two versions from a single RAW file ) is straightforward, and the tutorial is here - http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1856992
Basically you use a mask to reveal one of the images by painting with the brush using black or white ink on the mask layer - black reveals and white conceals.
Ah ha! Part of the puzzle solved!
See here I was thinking HDR - therefore 3 exposures and i was wondering how I would blend 3 layers with layer masks and somehow not have to do layer mask on _two_ top layers to get the bottom one to show through.
See here I was thinking HDR - therefore 3 exposures and i was wondering how I would blend 3 layers with layer masks and somehow not have to do layer mask on _two_ top layers to get the bottom one to show through.
Will give it a try sometime soon
Cheers, Jase
With 3 layers I generally put the middle exposure in back with the dark and the light on top with transparent masks. Then I can paint darker in one mask and paint lighter in the other.
When I want an effect akin to what you would get in Photomatrix, I duplicate the middle exposure, convert it to B&W, apply a moderately large radius surface blur and then apply it to the two masks (inverting for the dark layer). Then I use curves in the two masks to get the image roughly where I want it and touch it up with the paint brush. When my life settles down a bit, I'll write a tutorial on this.
As for local adaption in Photoshop, all it does is apply a curve to fit the source dynamic range into the target (32bit -> 16bit or 32bit -> 8bit) and then use USM to bring back some of the smaller scale contrast. With some images USM works quite well for local contrast enhancement and for those the Photoshop HDR works quite well. Here is an example:
With this image I used the USM built into Local Adaption to take the image from 32 bits to 16 and then ran a few more passes with different radii to bring back detail at different scales. The reason it works here is that there are high contrast details throughout the image which suppress the sharpening halos. For a different image the same procedure would have made hash out of it.
And, btw, F-stop, your last shot of the Nothern Window is an exact example of the "corpse effect" coming from a luminance-only based automatic HDR approach
I agree with that. There are some shots where manually combining exposures would work better. On the other hand, I notice you didn't comment on my other two shots I posted above, so I'm assuming you found no "corpse effect" with them. Point being, in most cases I find Photomatix does the right thing.
I agree with that. There are some shots where manually combining exposures would work better. On the other hand, I notice you didn't comment on my other two shots I posted above, so I'm assuming you found no "corpse effect" with them. Point being, in most cases I find Photomatix does the right thing.
Cheers,
-joel
Joel,
yes those two didn't display the effect, at least blatantly :-)
However, my primary point was: - you never know if it woudl, and you may not have a say in it.
Layer-based approach OTOH:
1) puts you in a complete control
2) guarantees no "corpse effect" whatsoever
I agree with that. There are some shots where manually combining exposures would work better. On the other hand, I notice you didn't comment on my other two shots I posted above, so I'm assuming you found no "corpse effect" with them. Point being, in most cases I find Photomatix does the right thing.
Being very picky on those shots, here are things I'd try to fix were they mine:
Aspens:
1. It may just be the scaling, but to me the yellow and green leaves in the look like they have lost detail by being pushed to the edge of the color gamut. I'd try pulling back the saturation just a tad to see if I could bring back some of the detail.
2. The mountains look flat and a bit pasted in, particularly set against the super contrasty sky. Generally contrast decreases with distance due to haze, but here the contrast enhancement seems to have bypassed the mountains leaving them looking a bit out of place. In particular I think the fact that the darkest part of the clouds is darker than the trees leads to the incongruity.
Clouds:
Again here, I think you've pushed the contrast of the sky a little too hard and left the ground looking a litttle flat by comparison. I'd try to balance the darks of the clouds against the shadows on the ground to create a more cohesive sense of depth in the image.
Well, I may be the corpse effect here after I ask this question (sorry Nik).
kdog, I walked thru the online tutorial at the Photomatix website. It mentioned using jpegs, but at the end I saw it could use RAW, which is good. But part of the problem I have now is an easy workflow moving in and out of PS from LR with different version of PSDs from the same RAW images.
Then I saw the best part on their homepage: Photomatix Pro plug-in for Lightroom as of 10/24/08 :ivar
Does anyone use this? While I still use PS (I just got CS4) I have become a real LR convert and this would be a boon to me since a lot of what I do in PS is multi-exposure or localized edits. I like what I see of Photomatix's results and their toolset (this is where Nik makes me a corpse:thwak ), and would like to use it for that and tone mapping more than HDR. And all for $99.
David/Devbobo - yeah it looked like that. I was there.
"Don't ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to. Oh well."
-Fleetwood Mac
Being very picky on those shots, here are things I'd try to fix were they mine: [...]
Thanks for the feedback, LiquidAir. Points are well taken. I did notice the blurriness in the aspens. It may be partially due to motion blue because it was extremely windy. HDRs can exacerbate motion as well. Plus, it seems like anything one does in post like contrast, saturation, curves, etc, causes loss of detail. So it's kind of hard to tell without starting over from scratch and carefully monitoring detail (I've done that before).
The clouds in the second shot.... well... the whole point of these HDR tools that Nik is ranting about is to make life easy by not requiring masking. So one tries to achieve balance by using global controls. I probably could have backed-off on one of the settings to make the clouds less contrasty though.
Well, I may be the corpse effect here after I ask this question (sorry Nik).
kdog, I walked thru the online tutorial at the Photomatix website. It mentioned using jpegs, bu that the end I saw it could use RAW, which is good. But part of the problem I have now is an easy worflow moving in and out of PS from with different version of PSDs.
The I saw the best part on their homepage: Photomatix Pro plug-in for Lightroom as of 10/24/08 :ivar
JD, the LR plugin sounds great. I may even try it myself, of course first I'll need to get LR. That being said, my workflow for Photomatix couldn't be simpler.
I start by opening Photomatix and pressing the Generate HDR button. That pops up a dialog with an area for file names. I multiple-select the RAW file sequence I want in Bridge, and drag the mutliply-selected files into the box and press OK. This generates an HDR, which you then Tone Map. Save out the results as a TIFF, which you can then open in CS3/4.
I know that Photomatix actually recommends importing JPGs over RAW because their converters aren't the best. In fact, they state that you can achieve the same results by just shooting in JPG and saving the conversion step. Makes sense I guess, although I most likely won't do that. So far I'm happy with the job it does on my RAW files. Maybe if I switch to LR and the plugin, I'll try HDR'ing after conversion and see how that goes.
F-Stop, Shutter,
I guess I understand the convenience of something like PM for a layerless (i.e. LR-based) workflow. I also may agree that it does a relatively good job in simple cases.
I, OTOH, use layers alot, so introducing a whole different tool just for "simple cases" doesn't sound like a good idea, especially if I know the I can address ANY case my regular way under a couple of minutes.
F-Stop, Shutter,
I guess I understand the convenience of something like PM for a layerless (i.e. LR-based) workflow. I also may agree that it does a relatively good job in simple cases.
I, OTOH, use layers alot, so introducing a whole different tool just for "simple cases" doesn't sound like a good idea, especially if I know the I can address ANY case my regular way under a couple of minutes.
If I was as adept at layers as you are, Nikolai, I probably would stick with it as well. I also wish I lived closer to you so that I could camp out in your living room and refuse to leave until you showed me.
The I saw the best part on their homepage: Photomatix Pro plug-in for Lightroom as of 10/24/08 :ivar
Does anyone use this? While I still use PS (I just got CS4) I have become a real LR convert and this would be a boon to me since a lot of what I do in PS is multi-exposure or localized edits. I like what I see of Photomatix's results and their toolset (this is where Nik makes me a corpse:thwak ), and would like to use it for that and tone mapping more than HDR. And all for $99.
David/Devbobo - yeah it looked like that. I was there.
JD,
I just downloaded the plugin after reading this post. The plugin isn't a plugin in the same context as the photoshop one. It's just a bridge between the standalone app and lightroom, so it automates the process of opening the file in photomatix for you. The good thing it does (if you shoot raw) is to export the images from lightroom as tiffs, so any local modifications done within lightroom on the raw files come across.
I start by opening Photomatix and pressing the Generate HDR button. That pops up a dialog with an area for file names. I multiple-select the RAW file sequence I want in Bridge, and drag the mutliply-selected files into the box and press OK. This generates an HDR, which you then Tone Map. Save out the results as a TIFF, which you can then open in CS3/4.
Joel,
Have you played with the 'Exposure Blending' with Photomatix much ? Prior to this trip, I pretty much always used 'Generate HDR'...but during the course of my roadtrip, I started playing around with 'Exposure Blending' more and I feel for most cases it produces images that look far more realistic and true to what my eyes actually saw.
As i said above, it appears to be only a bridge between the standalone app and Lightroom, well that's how it works for me, but i don't have the PS plugin.
Have you played with the 'Exposure Blending' with Photomatix much ? Prior to this trip, I pretty much always used 'Generate HDR'...but during the course of my roadtrip, I started playing around with 'Exposure Blending' more and I feel for most cases it produces images that look far more realistic and true to what my eyes actually saw.
Cheers,
David
Yes I have, David. I found that in some cases it did produce very good results. I was pretty excited about it originally. Intuitively that's all you really want to do -- blend exposures. But then I discovered that in other cases it doesn't work well, and then the HDR mode works better. In fact for me, HDR mode seemed to work out better more often, especially when I got more experienced at using it. It's got way more knobs to tweak than exposure-blend mode, as I'm sure you know. Maybe I need to go back and revisit it based on your report.
There's also the Tone Mapping/Tone Compressor mode. I don't think I've ever gotten good results out of that one.
Yes I have, David. I found that in some cases it did produce very good results. I was pretty excited about it originally. Intuitively that's all you really want to do -- blend exposures. But then I discovered that in other cases it doesn't work well, and then the HDR mode works better. In fact for me, HDR mode seemed to work out better more often, especially when I got more experienced at using it. It's got way more knobs to tweak than exposure-blend mode, as I'm sure you know. Maybe I need to go back and revisit it based on your report.
There's also the Tone Mapping/Tone Compressor mode. I don't think I've ever gotten good results out of that one.
Cheers,
-joel
yeah, I have never gotten good results using the Tone Compresser, but I have never taken the time to understand what it's meant to do.
one test I have meant to do, but haven't yet, is to go back and reproduce some of my HDRs that I did using 'Generate HDR' and see if I get a better result using 'Exposure Blending'.
Comments
On a related note, do you remember when Dave Porter was doing his focus alignment piece, he mentioned to do an Edit->Auto-Align Layers. In that tool there are 4 options: Auto, Perspective, Cylindrical, and Reposition Only. I think
Nik, do you remember? And yes I know CS4 has a tool built in for focus blending
-Fleetwood Mac
And don't forget, in CS4 you have Focus Stacking auto-blend mode:-)
Ah ha! Part of the puzzle solved!
See here I was thinking HDR - therefore 3 exposures and i was wondering how I would blend 3 layers with layer masks and somehow not have to do layer mask on _two_ top layers to get the bottom one to show through.
Will give it a try sometime soon
Cheers, Jase
Jase // www.stonesque.com
With 3 layers I generally put the middle exposure in back with the dark and the light on top with transparent masks. Then I can paint darker in one mask and paint lighter in the other.
When I want an effect akin to what you would get in Photomatrix, I duplicate the middle exposure, convert it to B&W, apply a moderately large radius surface blur and then apply it to the two masks (inverting for the dark layer). Then I use curves in the two masks to get the image roughly where I want it and touch it up with the paint brush. When my life settles down a bit, I'll write a tutorial on this.
As for local adaption in Photoshop, all it does is apply a curve to fit the source dynamic range into the target (32bit -> 16bit or 32bit -> 8bit) and then use USM to bring back some of the smaller scale contrast. With some images USM works quite well for local contrast enhancement and for those the Photoshop HDR works quite well. Here is an example:
With this image I used the USM built into Local Adaption to take the image from 32 bits to 16 and then ran a few more passes with different radii to bring back detail at different scales. The reason it works here is that there are high contrast details throughout the image which suppress the sharpening halos. For a different image the same procedure would have made hash out of it.
Cheers,
-joel
Link to my Smugmug site
yes those two didn't display the effect, at least blatantly :-)
However, my primary point was: - you never know if it woudl, and you may not have a say in it.
Layer-based approach OTOH:
1) puts you in a complete control
2) guarantees no "corpse effect" whatsoever
Being very picky on those shots, here are things I'd try to fix were they mine:
Aspens:
1. It may just be the scaling, but to me the yellow and green leaves in the look like they have lost detail by being pushed to the edge of the color gamut. I'd try pulling back the saturation just a tad to see if I could bring back some of the detail.
2. The mountains look flat and a bit pasted in, particularly set against the super contrasty sky. Generally contrast decreases with distance due to haze, but here the contrast enhancement seems to have bypassed the mountains leaving them looking a bit out of place. In particular I think the fact that the darkest part of the clouds is darker than the trees leads to the incongruity.
Clouds:
Again here, I think you've pushed the contrast of the sky a little too hard and left the ground looking a litttle flat by comparison. I'd try to balance the darks of the clouds against the shadows on the ground to create a more cohesive sense of depth in the image.
kdog, I walked thru the online tutorial at the Photomatix website. It mentioned using jpegs, but at the end I saw it could use RAW, which is good. But part of the problem I have now is an easy workflow moving in and out of PS from LR with different version of PSDs from the same RAW images.
Then I saw the best part on their homepage: Photomatix Pro plug-in for Lightroom as of 10/24/08
Does anyone use this? While I still use PS (I just got CS4) I have become a real LR convert and this would be a boon to me since a lot of what I do in PS is multi-exposure or localized edits. I like what I see of Photomatix's results and their toolset (this is where Nik makes me a corpse:thwak ), and would like to use it for that and tone mapping more than HDR. And all for $99.
David/Devbobo - yeah it looked like that. I was there.
-Fleetwood Mac
The clouds in the second shot.... well... the whole point of these HDR tools that Nik is ranting about is to make life easy by not requiring masking. So one tries to achieve balance by using global controls. I probably could have backed-off on one of the settings to make the clouds less contrasty though.
Thanks again for your thoughts.
-joel
Link to my Smugmug site
I start by opening Photomatix and pressing the Generate HDR button. That pops up a dialog with an area for file names. I multiple-select the RAW file sequence I want in Bridge, and drag the mutliply-selected files into the box and press OK. This generates an HDR, which you then Tone Map. Save out the results as a TIFF, which you can then open in CS3/4.
I know that Photomatix actually recommends importing JPGs over RAW because their converters aren't the best. In fact, they state that you can achieve the same results by just shooting in JPG and saving the conversion step. Makes sense I guess, although I most likely won't do that. So far I'm happy with the job it does on my RAW files. Maybe if I switch to LR and the plugin, I'll try HDR'ing after conversion and see how that goes.
Link to my Smugmug site
I guess I understand the convenience of something like PM for a layerless (i.e. LR-based) workflow. I also may agree that it does a relatively good job in simple cases.
I, OTOH, use layers alot, so introducing a whole different tool just for "simple cases" doesn't sound like a good idea, especially if I know the I can address ANY case my regular way under a couple of minutes.
Link to my Smugmug site
JD,
I just downloaded the plugin after reading this post. The plugin isn't a plugin in the same context as the photoshop one. It's just a bridge between the standalone app and lightroom, so it automates the process of opening the file in photomatix for you. The good thing it does (if you shoot raw) is to export the images from lightroom as tiffs, so any local modifications done within lightroom on the raw files come across.
Cheers,
David
SmugMug API Developer
My Photos
Joel,
Have you played with the 'Exposure Blending' with Photomatix much ? Prior to this trip, I pretty much always used 'Generate HDR'...but during the course of my roadtrip, I started playing around with 'Exposure Blending' more and I feel for most cases it produces images that look far more realistic and true to what my eyes actually saw.
Cheers,
David
SmugMug API Developer
My Photos
Is it the same plug in for CS2,CS3,CS4 or something else?
As always, google is your friend
http://www.hdrsoft.com/download/lrplugin.html
You beat me to it, Dev!
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
http://www.hdrsoft.com/download/lrplugin.html
As i said above, it appears to be only a bridge between the standalone app and Lightroom, well that's how it works for me, but i don't have the PS plugin.
SmugMug API Developer
My Photos
There's also the Tone Mapping/Tone Compressor mode. I don't think I've ever gotten good results out of that one.
Cheers,
-joel
Link to my Smugmug site
yeah, I have never gotten good results using the Tone Compresser, but I have never taken the time to understand what it's meant to do.
one test I have meant to do, but haven't yet, is to go back and reproduce some of my HDRs that I did using 'Generate HDR' and see if I get a better result using 'Exposure Blending'.
SmugMug API Developer
My Photos